Google Patents 'Electronic Shipping Notifications' for Its Own Inscrutable Purposes

Google may be complaining about "bogus" patents that threaten Android, but the company has plenty of patents of its own. Granted they're not that many when compared to its competitors, but one of the most recent ones shows that Google can apply for 'interesting' patents, just like anyone else.

Google was awarded a patent on "Electronic shipping notifications" a couple of days ago by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

If you're wondering what does Google have to do with shipping products, perhaps the patent's abstract will shed some light.

"A broker facilitates customer purchases from merchants. Shippers ship shipments containing the purchases from merchants to the customers. A shipper identifies a shipment using a shipment identifier," the abstract reads.

"The broker uses the shipment identifier to obtain the status information for the shipment from the shipper," it says.

"The broker analyzes the status information in combination with other information to calculate an estimate of the time that the shipment will arrive at the customer's address," it continues.

"The broker sends an electronic message, such as an email or text message, to the customer prior to the estimated shipment arrival time to inform the customer of the impending arrival," the patent's abstract adds.

Well, that didn't really answer much, seeing as Google does not have a strong ecommerce arm and that it would much rather provide services to online shops than open one of its own.

Still, there is a case to be made for Google, there is an online service in there somewhere.

A tool which would keep track of your purchases and notify you when they're supposed to arrive is useful and perhaps a service that aggregates this data or adds some additional features could be built.

But the thing is, most shippers already enable you to track a package's movements, so it's unclear what more could be done in this area. [via Geekwire]